Hannah Dreier '08
New York Times investigative reporter Hannah Dreier ’08 used to churn out news hits while embedded in Venezuela in the mid-2010s. She wrote countless stories on the growing humanitarian crisis in the South American country, but was frustrated that they never seemed to break through. There was an obesity epidemic when Dreier arrived in the oil-rich country. By the time she was detained by the secret police and barred from returning, she had seen residents eating out of trash cans and dying from a lack of access to necessary medicine.
“I was so outraged by the situation. I wrote all these stories about these horrible things that were happening to people, and just nobody read those stories at all,” Dreier said. “I’m here risking my safety sometimes to sneak into military hospitals and go out into these neighborhoods where there are frequent kidnappings, and my sources are risking their lives and their careers to talk to me, and nobody’s reading these stories. It was so frustrating.”
Dreier’s piece on a three-year-old girl from Venezuela, Ashley Pacheco, and her family’s rush for scarce antibiotics to treat her infected knee changed Dreier’s storytelling forever. The story deeply resonated with readers within hours of publication.
“Once I saw that there’s a way to write a story that’s going to really help readers empathize with somebody who they would probably otherwise ignore,” Dreier said, “how can you go back to doing the other kind of quicker reporting?”
Since she made the adjustment in her storytelling, she has put a spotlight on the dangers faced by underage migrant children working in U.S. factories, the rapid decline in quality of life under Maduro’s administration, a hidden culture on Long Island of those living in proximity to an international gang, and the plight of disaster victims waiting for government relief. Dreier has received two Pulitzer Prizes for her reporting. She is the only journalist to receive Pulitzers for investigative reporting and feature writing.
“There are so many important stories about these huge injustices that go unread because you’re sort of asking readers to eat their vegetables when you’re doing that kind of journalism,” Dreier said. “I try to find people who are deeply impacted by the policies that I’m writing about and then spend enough time with them that their lives are vivid on the page.”
Some of her most notable pieces have not only garnered widespread response from readers, but they have also led to policy changes to improve the lives of those affected. Two days after the first piece in her Pulitzer Prize–winning series on migrant child labor was published, the White House pledged an immediate crackdown, with then–White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre commenting on the “heartbreaking and completely unacceptable” situations described in Dreier’s article. Former President Joe Biden announced an interagency task force to combat child labor. The task force has since increased scrutiny on business practices and many companies responsible have instituted policies to help fix the issue.
“The way that the government supports children who come to this country alone has completely changed, they all get social services now,” Dreier said. “Corporations have been really cracking down on the way that they hire people to make sure that they’re not hiring little kids to do really scary work.”
FEMA also changed a long-held policy that restricted disaster relief to those who could prove ownership of their homes, which prevented thousands of Black families in the South that passed down land informally between generations from obtaining the relief they needed.
Dreier has begun working on her next project, but the type of embedded investigations she specializes in can take years to report and publish. For example, her recent series on migrant child labor took two years of interviews, traveling to different states, and sifting through data to complete.
She said the next few years will be an urgent time for immigration reporting.
“A lot of Americans right now see immigrants as really remote from their lives,” Dreier said. “A lot of what I try to do in immigration reporting is just helping readers understand that this isn’t something happening far away, on the border, and to people that you’ve never met. Immigration is an issue that, I think, affects us all, and immigrants are a lot more woven into the fabric of the country than a lot of Americans realize.”
